Walked into the bedroom and saw a dozen parrots on the neighbor's roof.
Many of them were also in the neighbor's oak tree, which he planted as an acorn in the 1960s.
I recently placed one of my trail cams in a new spot, thinking I'd be lucky to catch anything. I turned the camera sensitivity from medium to high so I'd be sure to catch, say, a fox or bobcat slinking through. On other cams, the "high" setting is just a little faster than medium, but on this cam every twitch of a blade of grass fired a series of three still photos. In two weeks it had captured 9,866 frames. That was not a good surprise! Not only did I have thousands of frames of blue skies, there were only a handful of frames with animals in them -- a scrub jay, deer on two occasions, and a couple of nights with a pack rat.
I've been keeping another cam at a different location since November. It was nice to catch this bobcat passing through, but most days caught nothing but squirrels and small birds. Even deer seemed to be staying away.
Coyotes are pretty rare as well.
The surprising thing was how few deer passed through over the weeks.
This spot is a good ways from any hiking trail, but the cams picked up a few mountain bike riders, as well as a couple of hikers and a dog-walker, and I wondered if all the human presence was keeping the animals away.
The tire track left by the mountain biker was still easy to see when I was up there on Feb. 18. No rain in all that time to help wash it away. But no new tracks, surprisingly.
And it seems like the cam is picking up an increase in animals passing by.
And of course the perennial gray squirrels.
Raccoons.
Plenty of gray fox too. Love those paws up on the branch.
It's always a pleasant surprise to capture a bobcat. The cam is set to capture three still shots followed by a 6-second video, so I was looking forward to seeing the cat move through the scene.
But the cat surprised me by stopping to smell the branch for the whole six seconds. Note the cool cat paw.
* * *
